computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...

, a locale is a set of

parameter A parameter (), generally, is any characteristic that can help in defining or classifying a particular system (meaning an event, project, object, situation, etc.). That is, a parameter is an element of a system that is useful, or critical, when ...

s that defines the user's language, region and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

. Usually a locale identifier consists of at least a language code and a country/region code. Locale is an important aspect of

i18n In computing, internationalization and localization (American) or internationalisation and localisation (British English), often abbreviated i18n and L10n, are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional peculiarities and ...

General locale settings

These settings usually include the following display (output) format settings: * Number format setting * Character classification, case conversion settings * Date-time format setting * String

collation Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order, or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation is a fundamental element of most office fil ...

setting * Currency format setting * Paper size setting * Color setting The locale settings are about formatting output given a locale. So, the time zone information and daylight saving time are not usually part of the locale settings. Less usual is the input format setting, which is mostly defined on a per application basis.

Programming and markup language support

In these environments, * C * C++ *

Eiffel Eiffel may refer to: Places * Eiffel Peak, a summit in Alberta, Canada * Champ de Mars – Tour Eiffel station, Paris, France; a transit station Structures * Eiffel Tower, in Paris, France, designed by Gustave Eiffel * Eiffel Bridge, Ungheni, ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

.NET Framework The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until bein ...

* REBOL *

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum (aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapp ...

Perl Perl is a family of two High-level programming language, high-level, General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, Interpreter (computing), interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it ...

PHP PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...

* Python *

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ...

* JSP *

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

and other (nowadays)

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

-based environments, they are defined in a format similar to

BCP 47 An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the su ...

. They are usually defined with just

ISO 639 ISO 639 is a set of standards by the International Organization for Standardization that is concerned with representation of names for languages and language groups. It was also the name of the original standard, approved in 1967 (as ''ISO 639/ ...

(language) and

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are two-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to represent countries, dependent territories, and special are ...

(2-letter country) codes.

POSIX platforms

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming inte ...

platforms such as

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

and others, locale identifiers are defined by

ISO/IEC 15897 ISO/IEC 15897 (''Procedures for the registration of cultural elements'') is an ISO/ IEC standard for the registration of new POSIX locales and POSIX charmaps. This standard is the result of a "fast-track" adoption of CEN ENV 12005, a European p ...

, which is similar to the

definition of language tags, but the locale variant modifier is defined differently, and the

character set Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

is included as a part of the identifier. It is defined in this format: . (For example, Australian English using the

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

encoding is .) In the next example there is an output of command locale for

Czech language Czech (; Czech ), historically also Bohemian (; ''lingua Bohemica'' in Latin), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. Spoken by over 10 million people, it serves as the official language of the Czech ...

(cs),

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. Th ...

(CZ) with explicit

encoding: $ locale LANG=cs_CZ.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_TIME="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_NAME="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_ALL=

Specifics for Microsoft platforms

Windows uses specifi
language
an
territory
strings. The ''locale identifier'' (LCID) for unmanaged code on Microsoft Windows is a number such as 1033 for English (United States) or 1041 for Japanese (Japan). These numbers consist of a language code (lower 10 bits) and a culture code (upper bits), and are therefore often written in

hexadecimal In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal (also base-16 or simply hex) numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using 10 symbols, h ...

notation, such as 0x0409 or 0x0411.

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

is starting to introduce managed code application programming interfaces (APIs) for .NET that use this format. One of the first to be generally released is a function to mitigate issues with

internationalized domain name An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-latin script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin, simplifie ...

s, but more are in

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

Beta 1. Starting with Windows Vista, new functions that use

locale names have been introduced to replace nearly all LCID-based APIs.

References

External links

BCP 47

Language Subtag Registry

Common Locale Data Repository
* {{Javadoc:SE, package=java.util, java/util, Locale

Javadoc Javadoc (originally cased JavaDoc) is a documentation generator created by Sun Microsystems for the Java language (now owned by Oracle Corporation) for generating API documentation in HTML format from Java source code. The HTML format is used ...

API documentation
Locale and Language information from Microsoft

MS-LCID: Windows Language Code Identifier (LCID) Reference from Microsoft

Microsoft LCID list

Microsoft LCID chart with decimal equivalents

ICU Locale Explorer

Debian Wiki on Locales
* Article

by

Nathan C. Myers Nathan or Natan may refer to: People *Nathan (given name), including a list of people and characters with this name *Nathan (surname) *Nathan (prophet), a person in the Hebrew Bible *Nathan (son of David), biblical figure, son of King David and ...